Each country must submit one song to represent them in any given edition they participate. There has been a rule which forbids any song being entered which has been previously commercially released or broadcast in public before year 2000.

Countries may select their songs by any means, whether by an internal decision of the participating contry or a public contest that allows the country's public to televote between several songs, these public selections are known as national finals.

Regardless of the method used to select the entry, the song's details must be finalised and submitted before a deadline some days before the international contest.

The voting system is the same used in Eurovision Song Contest, which has been in place since 1975, and is a positional voting system. Countries award a set of points from 1 to 8, then 10 and finally 12 to other songs in the competition — with the favourite song being awarded 12 points.

After all countries have voted, when all the points have been calculated, the admin of the show call upon each voting country in turn to invite them to announce the results of their vote. Currently, the votes from 1 to 7 are displayed automatically on screen and the remaining points are read out in ascending order by the spokesperson, culminating with the maximum 12 points.

In the event of a tie for first place at the end of the evening, a count is made of the total number of countries who awarded any points at all to each of the tied countries; and the one who received points from the most countries is declared the winner. If the numbers are still tied, it is counted how many sets of maximum marks (12 points) each country received. If there is still a tie, the numbers of 10-point scores awarded are compared—and then the numbers of 8-points, all the way down the list. In the extremely unlikely event of there then still being a tie for first place, the song performed earliest in the running order is declared the winner, unless the host country performed first in the running order. The same tie-break rule now applies to ties for all places.

Since each of the participating countries casts a series of preference votes, under the current scoring system it is rare that a song fails to receive any votes at all. Under the rules this means that the song failed to make the top ten most popular songs in any country.

When it does happen, it is often referred to in the British populist media as nul points (pronounced as if it were French, although the phrase is meaningless in French). In fact the phrase nul points is never actually read out during the presentation of the Contest. French for "no points" is pas de point and zéro point, and none of these phrases are used in the contest as no-point scores are not announced by the presenters.

It was decided in the WSC#1 that two semi-finals would be held. Countries must participate in the semi-finals in order to proceed to the Grand Final. The only countries which automatically qualify for the grand final are the host country, and the top four from previous edition.

Starting from the wsc#1 because of the high number of countries, which wishes to participate, there were introduced three semifinals.

In each of the semi-finals the voting is conducted among those countries which participate in that semi-final in question. With regards to the automatic grand final qualifiers, which do not participate in the semi-finals, a draw is conducted to determine in which semi-final each of them will be allowed to vote. In contrast, every participating country in a particular edition may vote in the grand final — whether their song qualified from the semi or not.

After the votes have been cast in each semi-final, the countries which received the most votes—and will therefore proceed to the grand final —are announced in random order of their ranking. Full voting results are withheld until after the grand final, whereupon they are published by the admin.